I think that’s a pretty cool shot. It’s a truck doing its thing on a New Zealand beach, which counts as a road and all the laws/rules that govern such a thing. As long as you’ve got 4WD and a permit, you can drive up and down a beach no problem.

TL;DR:

Shoot long. It’s OK to tilt the image. Think about the setting.

Over the years I’ve shot a lot of cars. From Kias to Lamborghinis to Land Rovers, every one is a different challenge. Not least of all because of time constraints and location choices, like the good ol’ days of working for a national magazine and having literally 15 minutes to find a location, shoot, and get back to the office regardless of weather, time of day or any of those fun things to factor in. But, the flip side is it taught me to work quick, see the shot, get the shot, and get out.

Prior to this shoot for the 2019 Ranger Raptor I had a little discussion with motoring behemoth Dave McLeod from Tarmac Life – NZ’s premier motoring blog and information hub – to discuss the aforementioned location to shoot this kind of vehicle. It sounds obvious… and I guess it is, but where you shoot something and the setting in which it lives is all part of the story. We’ve been sadly forced to shoot a ton of cars in car parks over the years and it doesn’t help sell the product or the story. To me, trucks belong outdoors doing something messy. Muscle cars belong somewhere gritty. Race cars belong on a track. That sorta thing. Again, probably obvious but if you have a list of go-to options for each type of vehicle you’ve done half the work before you even head out the door.

Case in point: when I shot the Mustang. That wouldn’t look nearly as cool on a beach and the Raptor wouldn’t look as cool down this alley.

So, location. It’s important. In the same way that food photography isn’t about the food, car photography isn’t about the car. It’s about the setting and the environment.

Unless it’s a muscle car I shoot long. I like the background to be part of the image so I pull it forward as much as I can. That invariably means I take the 70-200 2.8 IS MkII and not much else unless there’s something specific in mind. It’s a honker of a lens, weighs 1.5kg, about a foot long and one of the most inconspicuous pieces of gear out there.

If I need wider or just want that distortion (like in the shoot above) to elongate the nose or back I’ll take a 24-70 f/2.8 L mkII but mostly I’ll just grab the big white lens.

When I shoot cars I cover these basics:

Outside.Inside.Details.

And break that down a little more to:

Outside – front, back, sides, 2/3 (sort of angled)

Inside – seats, dash, steering wheel, whole cabin.

Details – anything that looks cool design-wise. Speak with the writer/client/dealership/agency if there’s anything they specifically mention and get a shot of it.

Again, probably super duper obvious but having a little checklist like this helps me stay on track and also means I’m not holding up the process by taking 4 hours to get the right shot of the car by walking around it 300 times looking for ‘the angle’.

Shoot long to bring the background into the shot.

Another thing I’ll do occasionally is tilt the image. On moving shots especially this looks a lot more dynamic if the car is moving upward into the frame, or downward out of it. Don’t go crazy, but 5 degrees here or there is totally fine. The shot of the Amarok above was tilted in post as I think it looks more interesting that way. The client agreed which is generally a plus.

Detail shots look a little like this:

I knew specifically that the article would mention Baja mode and the wheels so they get a shot.

Motion Shots:

I use the centre AF point and use AF Servo mode to track the subject. cropping in later if need be. Basically the camera does the hard work. Since I use back button focus on my bodies, I just hold it down to focus and shoot when I think it looks cool. I’m not a huge fan of machine gunning images and shooting 60 images in a burst. I’ll take 4 or 5 each pass of the car and refine the shot each time once I think I know what I’m looking for in terms of background or things like wheel placement or angle of the car to the camera. Taking thousands of pics doesn’t benefit anybody and yes, storage is cheap but more time in front of a computer unnecessarily isn’t my idea of a job well done.

After shooting food and interiors for 6 months I needed to do something for myself. Wait, that sounds somewhat selfish so let me extrapolate: one of the reasons we do this (and by extension painting, design, music, films, anything creative) is to feed that little thing inside of us that yearns to do something other than sit in an office for 9 hours a day watching the clock until we can become ourselves again.

Recently I was chatting with a dear friend of mine (hello, D) about ‘art’ and feeding oneself. The crux of my perspective is that for every bit of client work you do you’ve got to do something for yourself that isn’t for money, or to a brief, or with art directors or whatever happens on set/in-studio. For me, that’s sometimes walking off by myself in the woods and taking crappy macro shots of whatever I see in there, or it’s walking around the block with a 50mm and seeing what I see outside my front door. For you that might be throwing paint on a canvas, or carving something from windfallen branches.

And honestly, sometimes I come back with 20 awesome images and sometimes I come back with 1 that’s a 5/10 after 3 hours. That doesn’t really matter though, the fact is you’re out there indulging that part of you that needs to feel the breeze, see the rocks, and not worry.

Anyway, hopefully you get the point.

That leads us at last to the subject of this post: a shoot with a model I adore and love working with and an excuse to use my fancy lenses that don’t seem to get much use in the commercial realm in which I operate.

Key is camera right, in front, and pretty high (look at the shadow under her nose). The rim light is around the back left which you can see is lighting up the model’s waist, shoulder, hair and providing the separation between subject and background. If that light wasn’t there, the whole left side becomes black and we don’t want that if we can help it. If you have to bring up the shadows in post you’re going to get noise (noise only lives in the shadows btw, it’s the camera sensor trying to put in information that isn’t there), so stick a light source round there (reflector, or have the model put their back to the sun) and you get a definite distinction between the layers of foreground, subject, background.

Some notes on the terms:

Key light – to me this is the light that covers the entirety of the subject from the front.
Rim light – you can call this a separation light, that’s probably a lot easier.

When I light I’m thinking inversely. As in, I’m thinking where I want the shadows to be as oppose to what I want to light. Then if you want to get into it you can drill down into how you want the nature of the shadows to be – hard, soft, gentle, harsh – then choose your modifier or setup to match. It’s the whole thing of ‘working backwards’ – envision what you’re aiming at and work towards it.

For this setup I wanted harder shadows:

I love that shot. The hands are perfect (nothing to do with me). This is literally a white wall in a hotel room and a silver umbrella at just above head height and more in less directly in front of the model pointing right at her.

This is where I need to give props to the model. My direction consisted of something like “hey, what about here?” and pointing at a spot on the wall in between the TV and the coat hooks. The rest is all her and it’s professionals like this that mean we’re going to get awesome images.

The lighting surely helps but you can only shoot what’s in front of you, and if they’re one of those people who think modelling is just looking at the camera so you get 200 copies of the same pose, you’re not going to have a productive shoot and, for me, it’s tiring to constantly direct as well as thinking about all the other stuff.

Same setup.

Now this was on a very sunny day in a room with an enormous window that takes up one wall. This meant that we’re dealing with a very bright light source and in order to shoot at f/2 or f/2.2 we’d need to be at a very fast shutter speed. The AD600 lights can get down to 1/8000 and sync, but then we get issues like colour balancing (tinted windows), shadows from the sunlight, and a myriad of things I’m not interested in dealing with. So draw the curtains and replicate the sunlight.

I wanted this to feel natural, like a lazy morning away, not obviously lit and setup or contrived. That meant roughing up the bed for 5 minutes by basically pulling off the covers then ‘making it’ pretty half-assedly, then throwing the pillows in an about right position to make it look slept in. I find it quite distracting and breaking the 4th wall when shoots in bedrooms are on these perfectly crisp sheets and very obviously just made beds… plus, nobody in the real world makes beds like they do in hotels.

Here I’m basically trying to replicate sunlight by using a big, soft light just off the edge of the bed.

The closer the light = the softer it becomes. Move that sucker in close.

There’s no separation lights or anything here, just the one light off to the right and a camera at 85mm and f/2. I wanted to be at eye level so it looks more intimate and honestly the higher up I got the more it just looked like an ass shot, which is all well and good sometimes, but wasn’t what I wanted to achieve. This is all about the face and positions of the hands and shoulders and, for me, I find it more alluring when it’s seductive rather than blatant. I got in touch with the model and asked if she could talk a little about her process during shoots:

Moved the light to the foot of the bed, switched to 135mm and cropped some shots to a 16×9 aspect ratio to make it look more cinematic.

That’s wide open at f/2, with the light down to it’s lowest setting.

In beauty shoots one of the most tried and true lighting systems is called Clamshell lighting, which is basically 2 light sources on an axis and the subject in the middle. Essentially, one light above, one below, model in the middle. It’s a timeless setup that isn’t always available due to space or time or a million other reasons. But, you can do the same thing by having the model lay down and put a light just past their head and a reflector or something just out of shot.

Like that.

Change the angle and you get this:

Exactly the same light but the model just twisted slightly so it fell differently. I think that’s a beautiful photograph.

Someone emailed me about editing. Specifically colour grading. You may have noticed that in these images apart from the monchromes there are no pure blacks or pure whites. That’s a stylistic choice made for this shoot, and in other shoots you’ll find the whole gamut. I made that choice here to make the images softer, less contrasty, sort of hazy, but have that warm mood.

Basically (and I do mean basically) you’ve got the shadows and you’ve got the highlights. Open up a curves panel and move the very bottom point slightly up, and the top point slightly down. Then go into the RGB channels and do the same thing with the different channels.

The way in which they work is roughly as follows:

RED CHANNEL – Moving this curve upward allows the reds to become stronger. Moving this curve downward means reds become weaker, causing reduction of red in the image. In other words the colour opposite to red will appear – mix of green and cyan.

BLUE CHANNEL – Moving this curve upward will allow the blues to become stronger and making images look cooler. Moving it downward will introduce yellows into the final image.

What does this mean? It means you can correct colour casts and introduce colour casts into your image. You can make the highlights warmer and the shadows colder for that orange/teal cinema look, you can cool down a very red image, or warm up an image such as a sunset where you want to double down on reds and oranges.

Anyway. I’ve waffled enough. Honestly colour grading is something of which I only scratch the surface and all I really try to adhere to is to make the skin tones look realistic. Beyond that, it’s fair game.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which cinematographers and directors of photography (DOP) can utilise all our favourite things like depth of field, camera angle, lighting etc to enrich the feeling we get from a character: in other words you can shoot in such a way to characterise the cast. We can do the same in photography since we have much the same tools available, the only difference being we’re recording a single frame.

Years ago I mentioned how I typically shoot guys in rock bands one way, and female professionals another. That’s probably common sense, but breaking it down and we get into the same territory used in cinema.

If we use a low angle on a shot, and shoot wide, we accentuate height, width and convey a feeling of physical power which can be used to intimidate (at the extremes) or convey authority and control.

Here’s a shot of actor Tyrone. He’s a guy known for his roles as a bruiser kinda character – the bare knuckle enforcer sorta dude. Shooting from low and having his hands in the centre of the frame accentuates the size of his arms, and him looking down has that menacing look to it.

Here’s another example where I’m shooting low to make people look tough.

Easy enough right? We’re all familiar with these concepts and see them a million times a day throughout media channels but it’s a tool to stick in your toolbox when you’re trying to present a feeling to the viewer of an image.

And this is shooting at almost the opposite way: eye level, warmer colour palette, longer lens to blur the background and convey approachability and friendliness. By warming up the colour palette we can make the images appeal in a totally different way than the cold-toned images above. To get this warmer tone I shoot around 6000K and might add a little tint in post processing to even out all the tones in a frame then desaturate just a smidge to stop it looking clownish.

And I should point out this isn’t a gender thing, it’s not shooting guys one way and girls another. It’s just simply using angles, focal lengths, DOF, and colour grading to convey something deeper about a subject.

Let’s make a cup of tea, sit back, put Gojira on your home stereo system and read a little bit about food photography.

See, ‘food photography’ kinda misleading. It’s over-simplifying the task because the food is only part of the frame, what you’re shooting is a scene, a memory that people want to have and an experience they want to share with their nearest and dearest. This is why pictures of plates by themselves don’t do anything to make people interested or do anything to make a kitchen any busier.

On my last shoot I heard the best thing I could ever hear from a client: “That picture sells food” the Operations Director said as he pointed to a picture of mine on a flat screen TV behind the counter where people order. It was a pretty innocuous picture of a sandwich looking fresh and inviting, bread all golden toasted and soft, next to a nicely blurred cup of coffee all steaming warmly, and way in the background a newspaper with the crossword page facing camera. All arranged quite succinctly on a wooden tabletop.

What does that image say? It doesn’t say “this will cost you $10” (or whatever it costs, I just made that up), it says “this is a nice relaxing thing to do before you start your day” and that, dear friends, is what a successful image needs (in this instance) – it has to speak.

That probably sounds pretentious, and it might be, but it’s also right. If you’re shooting food, sell a scene. Plates by themselves look like menu shots in food courts. Set the table how it should be, get a glass of wine, a pepper grinder, a salt shaker, set up another place for someone else while you’re at it since not many people dine alone.

And now here’s some food.

All shot at 70mm, lit from somewhere close to behind with a silver reflector occasionally used camera right to kick some light back in. Nothing fancy.

When it comes to styling food, I like to fill the frame but obviously make the thing on the plate the hero/focus and like all my shoots it involved working backwards.

What?

If you don’t know what you’re aiming at you’ll never get it. If you can visualise the image in your head before you even pick up the camera or move a light you’re 90% there, the rest is just making it happen.

And, since that restaurant was putting on a festival all about seafood we shot some stuff for use in EDMs, backgrounds for copy, print ads, social content the usual thing… I’ve probably rambled before about how commercial photography now is different to what it was 10 years ago. Taking pictures is still taking pictures but the outlets for the images is hugely diverse now. I give my clients image libraries, shots of everything like the venue, kitche, food, service. I want to enable my clients to tell their story through a curated selection of images and give them imagery they can use to reinforce or build a brand across all their networks like print, social, EDMs, web banners… the usage of the pics is limited only by the imagination of the marketing department.

And that’s about it, rather than throw 600 images at you to stroke my ego I try to bring meaningful information here and hey, maybe this’ll help.

FL as you’ll see specialise in alternative fashions. Grungy, bold, vivid, alluring, and it’s all one-off stuff. Real cool and encouraging that there’s people out there blazing their own trail and kicking mountains of ass along the way.

So what’s my job here as the photographer?

Make the outfits look great

Make the model look great

Present both in a way that is eye-catching and on-brand.

Now that I see it written down, that’s pretty much the MO for every shoot but, drilling down into it and researching the brand you get a clearer idea of what is “on-brand” for this particular brand and why the same approach probably wouldn’t work for Armani or Davidoff as what would for FL.

So with that in mind and homework done (by perusing the etsy page, website, IG and other social profiles) there was a bit of a gameplan about the ‘look’. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s way easier to know where you’re going if you have a direction to go in. I think backwards. Start with the end, then figure out what steps to take to get to that point.

The wardrobe was obviously going to be handled by FL. My job is location, lighting, settings, and a little bit of discussion/direction about what I’m thinking would work well and why I’m thinking it – this last point usually comes down to walking around a space you think is cool and looking for 3 or 4 distinctive locations you can use within the overall space. For this shoot in particular, which took place in an old metal workshop, I used the main shop floor for 90% of it, but earmarked 5 locations that would combine well with different outfits.

I took a few test shots, checked where the natural light was coming in, what colours are present in the scene and made some notes.

Given the subject matter and style of outfits bright poppy colours wouldn’t do. I wanted industrial, gritty, scratched up, muted shades of olive and brown and tarnished worktops scarred through decades of use.

I guess this is visualisation. It’s kinda thinking through the job before you begin, get your workflow together, try and imagine where the light(s) should go and what shadows and shapes would that make? Do you need 1 light? 2 or more lights? Now’s the time to figure that out – not when the client walks through the door and you need to spend 20 minutes looking into corners and holding the ‘L frames’ in front of your face scoping out angles.
Key light was an octabox up high. Fill light if required was a softbox, a bare light, sunlight, or a combination of all of the above. I wanted an angular light to provide huge shadows so the main light was a bit more around the subject than I would typically do for a corporate gig or something a bit brighter, it wasn’t quite 90 degrees but you can see by the shadows around the nose that it was a pretty acute angle. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not so good, just move the light until you think it looks cool. You’re the judge here. Trust yourself.

Remember, you can make anything look badass with a light in the right place.

That sentence might encapsulate 10 years of doing this. Funny how it goes sometimes.

And here’s the images:

Editing these shots wasn’t that involved. The model already had great skin, the wwardrobe was taken care of, my lighting was right in camera, so editing was primarily global adjustments in LKR using curves (see below) and white balance to tone it a bit colder and bring some rich density into the midtones. I try and avoid pure black and pure whites in my shots where possible- they’re useless as they contain no detail, just black or white. They’re in there somewhere but it’s totally possible to make things look bright or dark without muddying it up or overexposing everything.

One thing I always do when I think I’m done with a shot is push ctrl+shift+L for auto levels. Do this on a duplicate layer. If you like it, then you’re all set, but if you don’t and you think it changes your colours too much, then set this duplcaite layer to ‘luminosity’ and it will only affect the lightness values and not the colour. This all your hard grading work is left intact but you get the full range from black – white. And I say this only as a “hey, this might help”, I ignore the auto-levels all the time because I’m happy with the look but if you need it, it’s there.

Curves and their curviness.

I mentioned something about using the curves function to change the colours of an image. I stumbled across this accidentally; Canon sensors tend to have quite red shadows which, to me, looks a little too warm. For shoots like this I want cold which is blue, cyan, teal, pale colours. So, open your curves command with ctrl+m, select the red channel from the drop down, grab the very very darkest point (usually bottom left corner) and drag it along the bottom edge towards the right corner. Move it just a little bit until the 0 becomes an 8 or 9. This is tinting the red in the dark regions towards blue, so the shadows will become less red and more blue, and therefore colder looking. Easy right?

For this setup it was my tried-and-tested unbeatable formula for almost any occasion from corporate to portrait to fashion to music to product: big octabox/light source in the back and a softbox around the front at roughly 45 degrees and pretty high. Aim for an f/8 exposure and the background to be JUST blown out into white. If you nuke the back it just overpowers everything and goes crazy, you just want a slight wraparound to the subject and it to look like a white cyc wall in a studio. Easy peasy. Then it’s up to you, and the subject, to understand how it looks and then roll with it. Good models (like Nicole) will change position after every click but it helps to ask the subject to just move their head a little, look around the frame and around the camera after every click. Right down the barrel, over the camera, look to the side, narrow your eyes, adjust your jacket, whatever, just subtle movements can make a big difference to the end product and help this from looking too ‘passporty’.

You can use a white umbrella in the back, a softbox, and any modifier you like ‘out front’ (a beauty dish looks especially cool). It’s a pretty sweet lighting system that you can use on a whole host of subjects and genres.

Once upon a time I was shooting production stills for a short movie called Just 3 Girls. While shooting on set I met a guy called Mana Hira Davis – you’ve seen him before, you just didn’t know it was him – he’s a stuntman doing films around the world, jumping out of buildings, being set on fire, no big deal, the usual stuff. We got talking about doing a photo shoot of sorts with no real plan in mind just something involving tactical gear, firearms, badass facial expressions with a vaguely paramilitary air.

These guys go all out. It’s 100% all the time. If they’re asked to take cover behind a wall of tyres, they don’t stroll over then crouch down. They run full tilt like they’re dodging bullets, yell for suppressing fire, then slam into the tyres and bring their weapon around to bear. It’s amazing to watch and shows the chasm that exists between the real-life working pros and the play actors phoning it in.

Humourous Interlude: The 3 guys met me outside the office. Mana asks me what kind of gun I’m looking for in the shoot. “Something big” I replied. “How big?” he asks, while opening the boot of his blacked out Subaru. “The biggest you got” I say, because really, that’s the only answer.

The boot swings open – and this is on a pretty busy street at 5pm so everybody is leaving work and driving past – and there’s a stack of guns in there, shiny, black, oiled, maintained. These aren’t water pistols, they’re legit replica guns (legit replica? you know what I mean) from movie sets so they’ve got the proper weight, the correct balance, all the moving parts like triggers and slides just without any of the firing mechanisms. Basically they look darn real (apart from the one from Halo for obvious reasons) and you’d be forgiven for thinking we were conducting some kind of clandestine arms deal in West Auckland. So if you drove past, looked over and saw a blacked out car full of guns and a guy saying “wow, nice balance” while hefting a Desert eagle, then you mashed the accelerator to escape the crazy people, my apologies. It was all for a photo shoot, I swear.

It’s a carjacking with a very big gun.

This was a bit of a challenge to light… well I say challenge, but I threw up one light on the left which is lighting Mana (on the bonnet), which left Tori’s face in darkness. What do? Throw another light on camera right to light the near side of the car so you get the balance in the frame and some context, otherwise Mana is just screaming at shadows which I don’t think he does frequently. I shot this at f/11, 24mm. The light on Mana is on about 3/4 power, the one round the other side near me is on about 1/4. I didn’t want equal brightness across both guys because to me the attention needs to be pulled upward to Mana’s ever so emotive expression so I left the car technically underexposed. Basically, it’s 2 lights almost facing each other. I hate on-axis lighting (like an on-camera flash would be), it’s flat, boring, 2d, and it eliminates all depth. If the light is coming from the sides or going across the subject though, that’s cool.

That’s an alternate angle from a bit later in the day. Same lighting. Same screaming.

As the shoot went on we got closer to a narrative as to why this was all going down. A guy lost something, he wants it back, he punishes the people who took the thing. That’s essentially it, but it gave us something to pin the pictures too and a story to work with.

Ambidextrous gun control there. Lighting in both those pics is a single big octabox pretty close at around f/5.6.

I wanted to get some solo shots of the guys, both for some characterisation and also so the guys would have something of just them if they wanted to include something in their portfolio.

Set faces to stun.

Lighting here is an octabox directly above, sort of in between camera and subject. If it’s directly above the face it leads to big deep shadows under the eyes which I didn’t want, so by bringing the light out slightly towards the camera it still looks just as cool but there’s enough detail in there so the viewer has something to connect with. Since the first thing people look at is the eyes, it makes sense to make them visible.

I do pro bono shoots every now and then (the one before this was for Shine up in Auckland) and I’d urge you to do the same whatever your profession. There are hundreds of charities and non-profits in desperate need of help (pictures, web design, even things like making posters) and would absolutely love to hear from you if you have some free time.

I saw a post on Facebook. A friend of a friend from the Women’s Refuge was looking for someone who could help out and take some pics of some women who had been through hell and come out the other side. There was to be an event, a ball, to celebrate the launch of a coffee-table book called Grim Tales featuring stories of these women and how they prevailed and triumphed through sometimes life-threatening abuse. For sure I put my hand up and volunteered to take the photographs. Nobody should have to endure what these women went through and if my mediocre skills help just a teensy bit then it’s worth it right? The only thing it costs me is time after all, but that little bit of time might give someone something they can cherish and look back on in years to come… which would mean printing the images.

I spoke to Kale Print in Tauranga and explained what the shoot was for and why I was doing it, and to be honest I was looking for some prints to give the women after the ball. Otherwise, no matter how good the pictures might turn out they’ll just be on a hard-drive, or on Facebook, or on a screen and forgotten about. A print is so much more meaningful than a collection of pixels and Kale Print, in all their awesomeness, were totally on board and offered to print an A3 on the house for the ladies at the event. How cool is that? Sometimes people are fantastic.

So, the night. I went down early to check out the location (The Incubator in Tauranga’s historic district) and try and find as many different backgrounds as I could that were in keeping with the theme and could be shot in the same room with minimal teardown/setup shenanigans. The Incubator is a total smorgasbord of random props and bits of sets from TV shows, stage productions, that kinda thing. None of it matches, and its eclectic wacky nature was a real inspiration in framing some of the shots.

Lighting was just a big octabox and occasionally a softbox for fill. I had to be quick with an hour to photograph all the ladies before they were needed for the ball and presentation of the Grim Tales book. Without further ado, here are the images selected for printing.

I wanted to make every image different, personalised but also hopefully complimentary to the outfit as a whole and testament to the strength of these women. I didn’t want the posing to be demure or effacing, but proud, forthright, unashamed. An attestation that they won’t be broken. I’m proud of what we accomplished that night. I’ve done a lot commercial jobs around the world for some pretty big clients, but this one means a great deal to me and hopefully, to the women involved.

Please go and check out the book here: http://taurangawomensrefuge.co.nz/grimtales/ and all the proceeds go to the Women’s Refuge who need all the help they can get.

And if you’re inspired or wondering if you can help out, have a look around on Google or Facebook for charities and non-profits in your area. What floats your boat? Conservation? Animals? Human rights? Someone out there would love to hear from you and have you on board.

I had the pleasure of photographing and interviewing the Bay’s fastest rising stars, Underrated.

My job here was to photograph, interview, and then write a 1,200 word article on the band for publication in one of the Bay’s well known magazines. It would be a 6 page spread and since I’m the guy asking the questions I wanted to look at the history of the band, the motivations, the reasons, and let the guys tell their story, whatever that may be.

The thought process here was to hopefully avoid cliches about rap group photography. I didn’t want to portray them as gangsters, with suits and Cristal and Bentleys , throwing shapes and giving gang signs. These are intelligent, witty, urbane, and soulful artists who just happen to make hip-hop music. I checked out their songs before the shoot and I was struck by the unflinching emotive rawness of their lyrics. They’re delivered sharply and slickly yet the subject matter is occasionally pretty heavy, like friends in jail, or teenage pregnancy, or not fitting in, or just a general fuck you. It’s quite refreshing honestly when a new group doesn’t just replicate what came before but follows their own voice.

So… photos. Since I knew it was destined for a magazine, that probably meant a DPS opener (double page spread). With that in mind I shot something with enough space left in the frame that would both be nice to look at but leave plenty of room for copy and the opening section to the article. Here’s a selection of options depending on what the mag wanted to run: band left, band centred (for a one pager), band right. All of which have enough space for words and a headline.

When shooting for magazine spreads it’s prudent to leave cropping space around the edges and also be mindful of where the gutter will lie (that’s the fold in the middle of the publication). Camera focal screens have a central focus point so you have a headstart when it comes to framing like this. Generally speaking, if you can avoid a face being in the fold of the page then do so. It’s the first thing people look at in images, and if it’s buried in a hard fold somewhere then your photos don’t look as good.

I lit the above frames with just an octabox on the left side pointed right at the wall. It’s the shadows I wanted, not really the light itself. I wanted to get a little bit of a badass vibe to the pic. These aren’t insurance salesmen, they’re rappers and I was actually inspired by Nako’s hat (guy at the front), because I knew that if you get the light high it’d cast these sweet shadows across his eyes.

Leading Lines:

The leading line of the wall makes the eye wander through the page from front to back, and I used that diagonal line as a counterpoint to the band, who are standing pretty vertically. Rather than having the guys just stand flat against a wall, I asked Shaayd (guy in the black) to face the camera, Joe in the middle could pretty much do whatever with his positioning as long as he stayed reasonably close to the wall. The guy at the front, Nako, pretty much only had one option (that I could see) from this angle which was to crouch down. This way, everyone gets equal space, nobody really looks like “the front man” (there isn’t one) but they look like they’re part of the same thing. I wanted Shaayd to face the camera to stop the eye wandering too far, like the focal point of the image ends where he stands, the leading line of the wall might be useful but it’s not the subject here (this was further emphasized by the fall off in the lighting, which I enhanced in post by darkening the furthest points so the eye is drawn to the brightest part – our band). There’s a bunch of simple things here that combine into a rather successful image.

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This was around the back of a closed cafe. We found a chair, found a little space with the sunlight filtering through a tree, I set up a light opposite and hey presto. I liked how the colours complimented the frame, like the reds and maroons are evident through the image from left to right. Again, just a big octabox to the right, shooting around f/14 to get everything in focus.

Next up it’s the good ol’ headshots. Again, trying to avoid the typical rap/hip-hop gangster vibes I wanted to do something serious, artistic, bordering on high-brow, and present these guys in an honest way with no probs, gimmicks, or bullshit. Just good light and a “stand there and look at me” direction. I like this kinda stuff, but it takes communication between the photographer and the subject. It’s unflinching, unforgiving, and there’s nowhere to hide so you’ve got to trust one another and chat enough beforehand to have a rapp

ort.

Here’s Nako:

And here’s Shaayd:

I guess I was trying to keep it dignified. Shot all these with a 135mm @ f/3.5. Lit with a softbox up front and an octa round the back for the white background effect. And here’s the opening page.

Great fun with some great dudes. Here’s their Soundcloud if you want to give them a listen: https://soundcloud.com/bayunderrated

I put my hand up (well, on Facebook) to offer my services for a short film being made in the Bay of Plenty by BOP Film. The film is called Just 3 Girls, directed by Anton Steel, written by Daryl Belbin, filming by Chris Kirkham, Steve Lawton, Jared Something, and Andrew Taylor on camera assist.

There are loads of other people to name, including 100 extras who volunteered their time for one of the action scenes.

I’m on productions stills and photographing behind the scenes. I think I whittled it down to about 50 shots each from the 3 days, and then whittled that down to 10 from each day that tell the story of a bit of the film, and some shots showing off the awesome teamwork present on set where everyone helped out the other guy and chipped in, if required people threw on a hi-vis and directed traffic, people grabbed gear, others held reflectors or dried off headphones… whatever it was, someone volunteered their time and energy to make it happen.

Those are some giant pictures.

So, this wasn’t shoot all about lighting and post production and fancy stuff, it’s about recording what’s happening on when the actors are doing takes. I didn’t shoot at all during actual takes, and tried to get myself out of the way of the cast and crew, for a couple of reasons:

1- you’d probably be in someone’s eyeline when they’re doing a scene, something always better avoided. It’s not fair to the actors and honestly if you’re just looking, you don’t need to be there and the cast/crew need space to work.

2- Unless you’re using a sound blimp to completely remove shutter noise there’s a chance the booms and sound guy will pick up your shutter sound. There’s a strong chance they won’t hear it, but you’ve got like 6 rehearsals to grab the shots so it isn’t generally worth the risk to have shutter sounds on the final recordings.

For 90% of the shots I used the trusty 24-70 L. No fuss, it just works and takes rather nice pictures, it can focus really close, is pretty wide on a full frame camera and focuses fast. It’s a true workhorse. I also packed the 50mm 1.4 and 135 f/2 but used these sparingly, or when I wanted to compress the field a bit more or pick something out of a crowd. Or someone can give you the finger while you’re thinking about your lens choice.

I wish there was more to write… but honestly the whole thing is capturing what’s happening in front of you, the majority of which comes down to decent positioning and timing so you get the shots you need when they happen. There’s a saying in sports photography: “if you see it through the viewfinder, you’ve missed it” which is entirely accurate here: you gotta snap as it’s happening, not afterwards. This means you need to watch the rehearsals, listen to the DOP or the stunt coordinator or the director or whomever else is calling the shots and anticipate who’s going to be where and then think where do you need to be to give yourself the best chance of getting the shot.

There’s a huge massive gigantic amount of talent packed into that last shot. You’ve got stuntmen from LOTR, Karl Urban’s body double, martial artists, prop makers, set designers, wardrobe, makeup, hair stylists, runners, actors, stunt coordinators, fight choreographers, screenwriters, runners, coffee makers, traffic directors, production crew, social media gurus… all of whom volunteered their time to spend 3 days making a movie to put BOP Film on the map and draw the eye of moviemakers to the region. A region which is studded with incredible scenery in a reasonably central location and with an awesome abundance of world-class dudes and dudettes right on the doorstep. Here’s to many more projects.